Roland Tatnall, Managing Director, Cennergi

AFRICA EVENT REPORT

POD 3 : UTILITY-SCALE RENEWABLES AND STORAGE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN MINES

CENNERGI: THE DRIVE TO DECARBONISE MINING IN SOUTH AFRICA

Roland Tatnall, Managing Director, Cennergi

Cennergi focuses on the three business pillars of utility generation, services related to renewable asset management, and distributed generation. In the words of Tatnall, the company is a solutions provider looking to solve customers’ needs including cost reduction, energy security (or a combination of these two), plus emissions reduction.

Cennergi’s flagship project is its solar PV utility at Lephalale for customer Exxaro Resources. “We’re providing energy to the largest open pit coal beneficiation project in the world with long term offtake agreements with Eskom, so really a great customer to be providing a long term renewable energy solution for,” says Tatnall. Work is well advanced on Phase 1 of 70 MW (behind the meter), and financial closure should be “fairly soon.” Phase 1 is expected to save 36% on Scope 2 emissions for Exxaro, plus more than 12% annual savings in electricity cost upon full production. The latter could magnify, according to Tatnall.

“Cost saving from now are obviously going to increase in terms of the gap between the pricing that we deliver and

AFRICA EVENT REPORT

POD 3 : UTILITY-SCALE RENEWABLES AND STORAGE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN MINES

Eskom tariffs as the tariffs increase on Eskom side,” he observes. “But our tariffs increase in alignment with CPI.” In general, Cennergi can solve for 60% plus of a customer’s energy needs with a fairly low-risk combination of renewable resources, without taking the customer entirely off-grid. However, there are many challenges in providing a bespoke renewable solution to a customer, and this fact is coming to the fore on analysis of the rash of RFPs/ tenders during 2020 and 2021. “The solutions that were actually provided partly as a consequence of the way the RFPs were written, were not actually practicable or executable in the current environment,” according to Tatnall. “And I think that’s the reason why we’ve seen in the last six to nine months a tail off of RFPs.”

Cennergi’s RRODA (Renewable Energy Risk and Opportunity Domain Analysis) is a proprietary, digital project assessment tool that could make the process more reliable. Cennergi is therefore the only renewable developer to combine mining and renewable datasets to optimise site selection and high level design parameters with quantification of tariffs and savings - in both Rand and CO2 terms.

RRODA played a role when Cennergi signed an MoU last year with Eskom and Seriti to decarbonise cost-plus coal mines in Mpumalanga, and as well reduce the costs to Eskom.